Hide table of contents

Thanks to Marius Hobbhahn for the inspiration with this comment and to Stefan Schubert for motivating me to write about it on the forum!

 

tl;dr: Create a website, an Airtable, a Slack channel, a Google Drive, and even create coordination orgs so that new EA organizations have the resources to avoid wasting time and effort with "rookie mistakes".

The current situation.

The number of EA-aligned organizations has rapidly grown in the past few years. Charity Entrepreneurship alone is helping to establish about five new EA-aligned organizations per year. And I am sure there are many more EA orgs that I don’t even know about, because every time I attend an EA Global I end up knowing about a handful of new organizations and projects that I was unaware of. Many of these organizations are small passion projects initiated by a couple of individuals, and there are some of these that could potentially be scaled up into bigger and more successful organizations. 

My experience from attending the Meta Charity Roundtable at EAGxPrague is that there is a common sentiment among new founders of lack of guidance, lack of networking, and trial-and-error. As a founder of one of these small new organizations, I think this is a good point in time to put together efforts from EA organizations in order to learn from each other’s mistakes and successes, so that we avoid making "rookie mistakes".

 

Some concrete issues.

When creating our organization, I relied a lot on the EA Groups Resource Centre website, even though this is meant for in-person groups, like university or city groups. This website by Global Challenges Project is also useful. But I think we also need a similar website for outlining a common strategy among EA organizations. For example, some of the key questions I had when creating our organization were:

  • Should we aim for the EA movement to be “wider” (more people who are less engaged on average) or “taller” (fewer people who are overall much more engaged)? How should this shape our priorities for how we set up organizations?
  • What should our EA-aligned websites look like, in terms of design, structure, and aesthetics?
  • Should we use the "Effective Altruism" name in our organization description, or should we describe our organization without using the words Effective Altruism? What are the dangers involved in using the EA name?
  • Are we allowed to cover topics beyond the EA core areas if we want to achieve funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund or a similar source?
  • Should we set up our organizations as charities, NGOs, foundations, associations, or something else? (This might vary from country to country)
  • What is the best strategy for ads?
  • What should our social media strategy be?

I had to learn many of these things over the past six months, from over fifty 1-on-1 meetings at several EA Globals. I am extremely thankful to a number of people for their feedback, and I ended up making many friends and contacts in the process. 

However, I do feel like I wasted several weeks to months of my life and filled some funding applications wrong because I initially had the wrong answer to most of these questions. I think many people might be in a similar situation now and in the near future, particularly as the EA movement grows.

 

A note on EA-center and EA-periphery.

I think EA still suffers from strong founder effects from being created in particular cities in English-speaking countries. EAs in the Oxford-Cambridge-London area and in the San Francisco area live in a very privileged place in terms of access to the EA movement, and many might not be aware of the difficulties of being an EA outside of these circles.

As an illustrative example, I was an EA living in Latin America from 2015 to 2019. In these four years, I think I had the experience of meeting about 3 other EAs, usually when they came over to give a talk. For comparison, after moving to Europe I had the chance to talk to over 100 EAs in the last year alone.

For these reasons, I think the current word-of-mouth system presents severe limits when the movement is now growing outside of the Anglosphere, and might prove unsustainable.  There are many EA organizations growing in continental Europe, and I'm aware of some in Asia and Africa. The way this is currently set up, many people, particularly those outside the two English circles (Oxford-Cambridge-London and San Francisco) need to use trial and error to create their organizations and then attend an EA Global (usually traveling far) to get feedback. 

This is not a smooth experience. More established EA organizations could give us a greater clue on how to act by setting up some online systems now instead of later.

 

Some concrete suggestions.

  1. As mentioned above, I think we need a website similar to EA Groups but for EA organizations that are just getting started.
  2. There might be over 500 EA organizations at this point. I think we need a directory (e.g. an Airtable) to keep track of all currently existing EA and EA-aligned organizations. Michael Aird created one for longtermism/x-risk some time ago, but it might now be outdated, and there’s no simple form so that we can add ourselves to this table. Also, many other EA orgs work on areas outside of longtermism. I think this new table I'm suggesting could be managed by the Centre for Effective Altruism or a similar organization. Hopefully this table wouldn’t require a lot of time to update. But even if it did, it could be worth it in terms of networking opportunities and awareness of what organizations already exist so that we don't multiply our efforts unnecessarily.
  3. We should have a Slack channel for “EA Organizations” to share insights, exchange information, network, organize meetups, etc. The EA Groups Slack channel is useful, but it’s focused on organizers for local or university groups, not organizations.
  4. We could use a shared Google Drive with useful materials, particularly in terms of strategy (e.g. how to approach people outside of EA, how to do social media outreach). These documents should have reasoning transparency for why we are choosing particular choices as our strategy so that we are not just applying strategy chosen by established organizations blindly, but so that we can question it and pivot in case the epistemic/funding/talent situation changes.
  5. As David Nash has recently pointed out, organizations focused on coordination are either non-existent or lagging behind research-focused or career-focused ones. There seems to be space for more organizations that focus on helping others with infrastructure, networking, coordination, etc.

I hope that some established EA organization takes up this initiative. I also hope to hear more suggestions in the comments and that this inspires some work towards a more international and inclusive EA community!

20

0
0

Reactions

0
0

More posts like this

Comments6


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

Two notes on existing resources:

Thanks for sharing! I had no idea these resources existed. (I think most people don't know about them either)

Just two points:

-By a very rough estimate, I think the Wiki is missing like 70% of EA organizations, particularly the smaller ones. Seems like there's a lot of work left to be done adding them!

-How do we join the EA Operations Slack?

It's worth mentioning that the new Charity Entrepreneuship book How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit does go into some of the "concrete issues" questions you're asking. Particularly, the one on legal structure receives very good treatment (though somewhat lacking for non-US/UK orgs). They also go in some depth into media/website/aesthetics.

Anti Entropy are doing a lot of work towards this in the operations area, especially for new organisations. I think a lot of the things you ask for (especially in infrastructure) is currently provided ad hoc and informally (e.g. in various invite-only Slack workspaces) or by service providers and (EA) agencies that charge for it.

Thanks for the source. I had never heard about this organization before.

Precisely the "ad hoc and informal" nature of the current system is what I criticize in the main post. I wish that there was a website maintained by CEA or a similar organization filling this role, similar to the EA Groups Resource Centre.

[anonymous]2
0
0

A related post I wrote a while ago :) 

Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 25m read
 · 
Epistemic status: This post — the result of a loosely timeboxed ~2-day sprint[1] — is more like “research notes with rough takes” than “report with solid answers.” You should interpret the things we say as best guesses, and not give them much more weight than that. Summary There’s been some discussion of what “transformative AI may arrive soon” might mean for animal advocates. After a very shallow review, we’ve tentatively concluded that radical changes to the animal welfare (AW) field are not yet warranted. In particular: * Some ideas in this space seem fairly promising, but in the “maybe a researcher should look into this” stage, rather than “shovel-ready” * We’re skeptical of the case for most speculative “TAI<>AW” projects * We think the most common version of this argument underrates how radically weird post-“transformative”-AI worlds would be, and how much this harms our ability to predict the longer-run effects of interventions available to us today. Without specific reasons to believe that an intervention is especially robust,[2] we think it’s best to discount its expected value to ~zero. Here’s a brief overview of our (tentative!) actionable takes on this question[3]: ✅ Some things we recommend❌ Some things we don’t recommend * Dedicating some amount of (ongoing) attention to the possibility of “AW lock ins”[4]  * Pursuing other exploratory research on what transformative AI might mean for animals & how to help (we’re unconvinced by most existing proposals, but many of these ideas have received <1 month of research effort from everyone in the space combined — it would be unsurprising if even just a few months of effort turned up better ideas) * Investing in highly “flexible” capacity for advancing animal interests in AI-transformed worlds * Trying to use AI for near-term animal welfare work, and fundraising from donors who have invested in AI * Heavily discounting “normal” interventions that take 10+ years to help animals * “Rowing” on na
 ·  · 3m read
 · 
About the program Hi! We’re Chana and Aric, from the new 80,000 Hours video program. For over a decade, 80,000 Hours has been talking about the world’s most pressing problems in newsletters, articles and many extremely lengthy podcasts. But today’s world calls for video, so we’ve started a video program[1], and we’re so excited to tell you about it! 80,000 Hours is launching AI in Context, a new YouTube channel hosted by Aric Floyd. Together with associated Instagram and TikTok accounts, the channel will aim to inform, entertain, and energize with a mix of long and shortform videos about the risks of transformative AI, and what people can do about them. [Chana has also been experimenting with making shortform videos, which you can check out here; we’re still deciding on what form her content creation will take] We hope to bring our own personalities and perspectives on these issues, alongside humor, earnestness, and nuance. We want to help people make sense of the world we're in and think about what role they might play in the upcoming years of potentially rapid change. Our first long-form video For our first long-form video, we decided to explore AI Futures Project’s AI 2027 scenario (which has been widely discussed on the Forum). It combines quantitative forecasting and storytelling to depict a possible future that might include human extinction, or in a better outcome, “merely” an unprecedented concentration of power. Why? We wanted to start our new channel with a compelling story that viewers can sink their teeth into, and that a wide audience would have reason to watch, even if they don’t yet know who we are or trust our viewpoints yet. (We think a video about “Why AI might pose an existential risk”, for example, might depend more on pre-existing trust to succeed.) We also saw this as an opportunity to tell the world about the ideas and people that have for years been anticipating the progress and dangers of AI (that’s many of you!), and invite the br
 ·  · 3m read
 · 
Hi all, This is a one time cross-post from my substack. If you like it, you can subscribe to the substack at tobiasleenaert.substack.com. Thanks Gaslit by humanity After twenty-five years in the animal liberation movement, I’m still looking for ways to make people see. I’ve given countless talks, co-founded organizations, written numerous articles and cited hundreds of statistics to thousands of people. And yet, most days, I know none of this will do what I hope: open their eyes to the immensity of animal suffering. Sometimes I feel obsessed with finding the ultimate way to make people understand and care. This obsession is about stopping the horror, but it’s also about something else, something harder to put into words: sometimes the suffering feels so enormous that I start doubting my own perception - especially because others don’t seem to see it. It’s as if I am being gaslit by humanity, with its quiet, constant suggestion that I must be overreacting, because no one else seems alarmed. “I must be mad” Some quotes from the book The Lives of Animals, by South African writer and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, may help illustrate this feeling. In his novella, Coetzee speaks through a female vegetarian protagonist named Elisabeth Costello. We see her wrestle with questions of suffering, guilt and responsibility. At one point, Elisabeth makes the following internal observation about her family’s consumption of animal products: “I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad!” Elisabeth wonders: can something be a crime if billions are participating in it? She goes back and forth on this. On the one hand she can’t not see what she is seeing: “Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of